Free books
The print on demand revolution has been taken one step further in China where readers can order free, personalised books online - the catch is that they have to agree to advertising being inserted.
According to China Business News:
When selecting which books they want from BookGG, users can choose from a number of sponsors who wish to advertise in the books, and how many adverts they are willing to have. The location of adverts - front, back, middle or in page corners - can also be specified. If users agree to have enough adverts, the books will be provided to them free of charge.
Customers can also ask for books to be customized, for example, by having their names printed on the cover.
Once customers have made their selection, BookGG re-binds the books it acquired from publishers, inserting whatever adverts have been selected, before dispatching them.
You can read the full interview with Shen Bo, the publishing company’s president at China Business News.
Similar “permission”-based business models are taking hold in the mobile phone industry where content providers offer free content to mobile users if they agree to view adverts - or premium versions if the user prefers not to have ads.
Is there a business model for self-publishing authors to find investors/ venture capitalists for their book in exchange for advertising ? Certainly, product placement with funding in fiction has already occured - I think BMW offered prizes for short stories featuring their cars and I seem to recall a famous sex-and-shopping female novelist having designer brands sponsor one of her books (can anyone remember the author and which book it was?).
Photo: thanks to gigijin from flickr.com
- Posted on
Wed, September 19th, 2007 - Author
Yang-May Ooi - Category
- 4 responses
- Leave a comment
September 19th, 2007 at 3:25 am
I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. But I worry for the trees!
September 19th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Hal, if it minimises the financial risk for publishers of taking on new writers and it means they are likely to publish a diverse range of books and not just blockbusters, then it can only be good thing for writers. But, yes, more printed matter is a greater threat to the environment!
September 20th, 2007 at 3:28 am
Now that is thinking out of the box :)
Here’s the info on that book. I remember reading about it in our local papers.
From Wikipedia :
The Bulgari Connection is a 2001 novel by Fay Weldon that became notorious for its commercial tie-in: in exchange for £18,000 from the jeweler Bulgari, she was required to mention the name of the jeweler at least 12 times. Such a move was unprecedented for a published, established author (The Bulgari Connection was her 23rd novel), and a front-page article was published about it in the New York Times, quoting such writers as Rick Moody, J. G. Ballard, Michael Chabon, and Jeanette Winterson.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:24 am
Thanks, Lydia, for digging up that info. The publishing / literary world was quite sniffy about that experiment, wasn’t it? In my view for some novels like those sex and shopping novels of the ’80s where part of the fun of them was all that designer brand name dropping, the author might as well get some sponsorship - it’s like mobile phones and Aston Martins in James Bond movies: the brands definitely benefit from those guest appearances so why shouldn’t the author also benefit?